Shooting Stars
by PoppyStars
Summary: A little piece that takes place in Azarello's Joker's universe. Joker/Harley meeting.


I was re-reading Azarello's Joker and realized Harley didn't get much attention in the book despite the interesting facets to Joker and Harley's relationship that were introduced. So this is a bit of an expansion on those ideas.

She's the daughter of a junkie and all the cops know her father's name. Instead of a nightlight, she finds comfort in the small winking of syringes and broken glass on the floor, reflecting the buzzing streetlight outside. She thinks that in the dark of the room, they look like stars.

She's eight now and her father is finally put away on charges of assault. She and her mother do not go to the trial because her mother cannot afford to miss a day of work. They badly need the money.

Harley goes to school in sparkles and sequins long after the appropriate age. She doesn't have any clothes other than these, bought years ago but not threadbare yet to throw out. The other kids tease her, asking who she thinks she's fooling with the childish getup, and she cocks her head to the side because she wasn't trying to do anything. But now the idea's in her head.

They become her trademark and when she's finally old enough for a job, she continues to shop for anything reflective, anything bright away to take the attention away from her thin frame. If the little spots of light on the floor of her bedroom can turn a waste dump into a starry night, surely they can do the same for her. Turn her from an addict's daughter into something worth looking at.

Her free time is taken up by gymnastics. It consumes her, the way she looks in flashy costumes, flipping and tumbling her away across the floor like a shooting star. She loves to listen to the crowd cheer her on. As if there was nothing else but her. She pays for her own lessons now and she knows she's good. But to get anywhere, you need money, a dedicated coach, experience. Luck. She's got none of it.

By the time she's out of high school, she dances like a dream. She knows how to work crowds of people now, knows how to make them like her in her glittering heels and brilliant pink sweaters. Harley takes a job at the strip club because it makes her feel powerful, beautiful, in control. Pays the bills. Plus it has instructions for surviving the experience right in the name.

(The Grin and Bare It. And oh, she does. Later, when they bring her to Arkham for the first time and the doctors still pretend they don't just want to talk to her in hopes of getting Joker information, they ask her why she strips. She tells them if the nightclub had a different name, she probably wouldn't have done it. A pun to bring them together.)

She's 23 and beautiful when she's told she's got a private party that night. There's glitter permanently engraved in her skin and the stench of sweat is masked by gobs of bubblegum perfume. Her favorite scent.

It wafts into the air as she performs alongside two other dancers in the bachroom. They try not to look at the people sitting at the tables too closely, sure in the knowledge that they didn't want to know who was watching them bare themselves to the world.

(Grin and Bare It, ha!)

Harley struts out onto the edge of the catwalk and shakes her hair from the pigtails she'd bound it in, sending a hidden pocket of glitter there flying through the air. The boys closest to her cheer as she bends over, peering at them with a wink through her thighs, unable to see anything except the gentle twinkle of the sparkles in the air.

The other girls come close. There's a reason they're the ones chosen to do this and it's because Harley showed them a few moves, just enough to be able to help her out with her act. The high school cheerleaders taught her a couple of things.

They heave her onto their shoulders with a hidden grunt and send the little blonde flying through the air in a matter of seconds with a little help from the gymnast's own strength. Laughter bubbles up as she flips once, twice, twists, watches the world rock and shift around her. The bra unhooks mid flight and falls to the table below, much to the delight of the room. There's a soft pad in the back- one that had prompted many jokes about what it was for- and she lands with her back to the audience, arms raised.

They're going wild. Men rush over as she turns around with a flounce, gyrating her hips to the music screaming in the background. Money is stuffed in the sides of her black and red thong as she makes her way back to the stage. Club bouncers watch from the doors, keeping the owner's investment safe, making sure none of them slip their hands out of bounds. Strictly no touching unless you've paid extra.

Inwardly, she's hoping she can catch a glimpse of her bra before she makes it back to the stage. Harley knows from experience that if she leaves it out here with the patrons, she won't be getting it back.

One of the spotlights sweeps across the room to follow her and in the brightness of the light she finds the lacey thing again, resting on a table towards the back left of the room. A strange place for the momentum to carry it.

Wary of the money in her underwear falling out, she ignores the impulse to cartwheel over and instead walks with her head high, arms wrapped underneath her breasts to give the clients a view.

She notices the room around her has gone silent only when she leans on the edge of the table, staring at the long occupant as she reaches over one hand to snag her bra away from him. He's sitting against the wall, in shadow, and she's inwardly panicking.

Five years stripping and she still hasn't learned not to approach the shady men on their own.

A hand shoots out and grabs onto her wrist as she attempts to flounce away, back to the dressing room, back to safety. The bubblegum in the air, thick as cream, had hidden it, but she could smell it now- danger and the smell of rusty pennies.

"Not so fast dollface." His voice tells her and she makes herself tilt her head to the side and widen her eyes, because if there was one thing she knows, it's that these guys are dangerous and that she cannot show fear.

(It's another one of the questions the Arkham doctors ask her, born from frustration after a week without any useful answers from the pretty blonde with the blue eyes and glitter somehow _still_ caught in her hair. 'Weren't you afraid when you met him, Harley?')

"I like your laugh."

And just like that, the mobster who ran the underworld was just another guy in the room, and if she didn't focus on the scars that distorted his mouth, she felt like she could breathe again.

No, she wasn't afraid. She knew how to handle a **boy.**

It went fast after that, because he wasn't a man to wait for what he wanted and she wasn't the kind of girl opposed to moving up in the world. He didn't make her stop dancing at the club, which she was happy for, and she didn't say anything when he came to her apartment at odd hours, high as the shooting stars she still dressed herself in.

She went to the gun range every morning when it opened, still smelling like the club and dressed in the sweats she wore before work. She practiced for the nights he wanted her on his arm, the nights that held shady meetings and people whose names she'd only ever heard in a whisper.

They all stared when they saw that The Joker, of all people, had a girl on his arm. They gaped when she proved herself more than a pretty face, weapons appearing from nowhere and a smile on her lips to rival that of her beau.

He'd punch her in the stomach one moment, raging at some imagined slight or other problem with his business, and lie sobbing with his face buried in her flesh the next. She allowed it as long as he stayed away from the face- she needed her face more than she needed her body

He'd forgotten once and she'd kicked him out for more than a week before he returned with a new knife, a bottle of liquor that had cost more than the building she lived in, and silence that had stretched for another two days.

She had power over a man most of Gotham feared. The best was when she'd climb offstage and walk over to the table he now occupied in the club almost every night, the one that most of the wait staff and all of the other patrons avoided. She'd climb into his lap and smear his cheeks with her glitter-dusted hands and feel their eyes burning holes in her back.

She'd never had love and she didn't have it now, but she didn't need it. Harley didn't love the Joker- she loved knowing it was her that this great and terrifying man went to at night, when his demons haunted him. She knew he didn't love her, but she didn't know much more than that. She didn't really want to. The less about him she knew, the less she could accidentally let slip to those idiots at Arkham.

(The first time he broke her out of there, with three or four guys at his back, the doctors had stared in mute horror as she asked him why he hadn't come sooner. He'd launched a knee into her gut for the question and waved one of the men forward as she doubled over, wheezing for air. The guy had a bag slung over his shoulder with a thoughtful change of clothes inside for her.)

When it was him who was locked away behind those bars, caught by the big black bat whose silhouette hung over the city like a guillotine blade, she found herself missing the familiar looming figure in the corner of the club. The media called them lovers and profiled the pretty stripper who'd been seen on the arm of the most influential mob boss in the city. Arkham called her insane, a girl from a bad family that had been tragically drawn into the world of crime. The men called her "Miss Harley" because she wasn't their boss- more like arm candy with a purpose.

They were partners sometimes and companions sometimes and lovers most every night but even she found herself wondering at a name for their relationship. She thinks about it as his tongue traces at the center of her, scars tickling the soft skin of her inner thighs. But it's not too important.


End file.
